Acts and us
The Church’s custom of reading virtually all of the Acts of the Apostles at daily Mass during the Easter season struck me as particularly apt this year, and for three […]
perspective
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Homelands and social doctrines
With hundreds of bishops coming to the Vatican in October 2001 for a Synod, I decided to spend that month in Rome conducting interviews for what would eventually become the […]
perspective
After the Irish debacle
I wasn’t surprised by the result of Ireland’s May 25 referendum, which opened a path to legal abortion in the Emerald Isle by striking down a pro-life amendment to the […]
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Craving approval isn’t evangelization
The bizarre comment and the weird gesture have not, until recently, been associated with high-ranking churchmen. Both, alas, were on vivid display last month when Cardinals Reinhard Marx and Gianfranco […]
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Grace under pressure
A chapter in a remarkable American and Catholic life will close on June 6, when Abbot Thomas Frerking, OSB, concludes more than two decades of service as leader of the […]
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Justin Trudeau and the dictatorship of relativism
You’ve probably never heard of the Waupoos Family Farm. I hadn’t either, until I met some folks involved in it during a recent visit to Ottawa. Their story vividly illustrates […]
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The Holy See, China, and evangelization
In a recent interview, Cardinal Pietro Parolin, Secretary of State of the Holy See, suggested that certain critics of a deal between the Vatican and the People’s Republic of China […]
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Freedom is never free
When I first visited Lviv, the principal city of western Ukraine, in 2002, the transportation from plane to airport terminal was an old bus towed by a Soviet-era tractor; today, […]
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Making a diverse College of Cardinals work
With the exception of the two consistories held by Pope John XXIII in 1958 and 1959, every creation of new cardinals since Pope Pius XII has decreased the percentage of […]
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Baseball and Synod 2018
I trust it won’t cause heartburn among the editors of Commonweal if I confess to having cheered at a recent article they posted, “Quit Trying to ‘Fix’ Baseball.” Therein, Professor […]
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Roe v. Wade Derangement Syndrome
The defense of the indefensible often leads to a kind of derangement in otherwise rational people. That was the case with the defenders of slavery and legalized racial segregation; it […]
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Patriarch Kirill and Mr. Putin
The annals of sycophancy are, alas, replete with examples of churchmen toadying to political power. Here in the United States, we’ve seen too much of that among certain evangelical leaders […]
